My father in law used to say that the best salesmen are most often easily duped by a good sales job because they are impressed by the salesman. He used to teach sales.
Why are smart people more prone to bad psychedelic experiences?
German people had high nationalism and pride
Rejected Bolshevism even as some incubated it
Resented the way the west treated them due to WWI
They are a chilly rational folk
You can see that even today here the personality differences tween Scots Irish and Germanic descendants
Lots of reasons they supported fascism
I suspect that at least some of this phenomenon is due to the emergence and success of the two great and successful “absurd” breakthroughs of physics that turned our view of reality on its head in the last century.
Relativity and quantum mechanics are both exceedingly strange and yet are absolutely valid. Their acceptance and widespread promulgation “gave license to” absurdist pseudo-intellectuals in other fields, from psychology and religion (think dyanetics and scientology) to ethics (think Peter Singer) to social science (think Cloward-Piven).
They have the narrative in their head...It just needs to be fed...Annnnd dems are ready to feed the beast....
Has this been proven? I could be that people who just think they are smart are easily tricked. It has been proven that stupid people think of themselves as smart.
Answer: they weren’t intelligent to begin with.
The great majority of people with degrees are just going through the motions and mimicry.
True intelligence requires questioning yourself and your conclusions - anything else is just faith based beliefs.
Not that there’s anything wrong with faith - but we all know how zealots work…
A significant percentage of “smart” people are simply persons of mediocre intelligence whose parents were successful enough to send them to college where they became like trained dogs performing mindless tricks.
Smart people often suffer from hubris.
But these days stupid people often do as well - because if they are dems, the media protects them from reality.
Because they want to be.
Even smart people suffer from greed and envy. They’re just better at covering it up with rationalizing.
We have institutions whose sole purpose is to tell people that they are smarter than they actually are. They are called law schools.
Being intelligent really has no bearing on the level of emotionalism a person has, so what we see is that smart people who are ruled more by emotion than intellect are susceptible to the attacks and they respond accordingly.
People who are able to discern false accusations can deflect these attacks because they know they are untrue.
My belief as to why so many people are ruled by emotion goes back to our education system, and the reluctance to demand objective truth. When we are taught that there are no wrong answers, we lose our ability to objectively scrutinize many situations.
And so, we are repeatedly told that when the police are involved in violence against a person of color, it is racist (even when all the people involved are black- i.e. Memphis case of Tyre Nichols); yet, when blacks are perpetrators against white victims, there is not racism involved. Rather than risk being considered to be racist, the intelligent and emotional person will conform to the prevailing narrative. They will look at the full circumstances. Over time, these things just build up; racism, climate change, LGBT issues, and on and on. If they go against the narrative, they are told they are bad people, and they cannot consider any other alternative.
The problem isn’t with being intelligent. It’s with being self convinced. A lot of people, smart and not, make their decision and don’t move off of it. The “spat” referred to in the story is a great example. Doyle, remember the person who codified deductive reasoning, had such strong belief in the paranormal that he flat out told Houdini that the walk through wall trick Houdini did was magic. Like real MAGIC, not a trick. Houdini of course knew better, since he designed the trick and all, and even offered to show Doyle how he did it. But Doyle didn’t want to hear or see it. He was self convinced. It was magic.
I think numerous examples of this are hiding in plain sight. Among highly educated people of this era (supposedly intellectual), (probably) most of them have been through the indoctrination mill and have arrived at a point where irrationality looks rational.
Evolutionism (essentially, “rocks can turn into people if left alone long enough”)
Multiverse (it’s been “proven” mathematically possible)
Utopianism (if people only weren’t corrupted by oppression, they’d become perfect and happy ever after, whistling while they work)
Freudianism (oppression, repression and suppression are at fault; the individual miscreant is never at fault; original sin doesn’t exist)
Scientism (there’s a perfectly good scientific explanation
for everything; hence, there is no God)
Anthropogenic climate change (and the projections of near-term global catastrophe unless we spend trillion$ to fight it; it’s settled science)
Trump is evil (despite a panoply of futile effort to pin anything on him)
Trump’s supporters are cult followers and worse than Trump himself (since they oppose efforts to radically transform America)
Trump and his supporters are fascists (despite the fact they cannot even properly define the word or the concept — truth told, they need only look in a mirror to see one)
Etc.
They believe in the hype about themselves, as being a cut above the rest. It’s even worse with very wealthy people. Donald John Trump is an anomaly in that regard. Not saying he is without ego, but rather that his ego is far more subdued than people realize, or even give him credit for.
Survival instinct makes us look for signs and trends pointing to coming disasters.
The more intellectuals among us are naturally better at spotting clues and trends.
Unfortunately, it is far too easy for the intelligent to become lazy about testing their conclusions against countering theories and contradicting evidence.
Power seekers and con-artist use this gain fame and fortune.
Social/Peer Pressures also weigh in on this as well. If your social circle believes some falsity you are more likely to keep your unsubstantiated beliefs. If you recognize your error and start advocating a contra veiling thought than your peer group you are likely to be ostracized or subject to ridicule.
It takes a lot of courage or willingness to be excluded from your group to change your opinions.
lack of street time
naivete
George Orwell had them pegged with his, “Some ideas are so absurd only an intellectual could believe them.”
Some people who have went to college think they must be smart ..afterall, they went to college.